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UNIWERSYTETU ŚLĄSKIEGO

KATOWICE 2015

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ISSN 0208-6336

ISBN 978-83-8012-425-7

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The Self Industry

Therapy and Fiction

The Self Industry

Therapy and Fiction

“The term ‘industry’ can be stretched, either towards the conjoined pil-

lars of a society of mass consumption: the production of goods and

the necessary production of desire in willing consumers; or towards

the fabrication of mind and self among the synapses within the human

brain: the spark within our flesh somehow enables an I and an eye to

emerge, an identity that can (and should) then be implemented into the

processes of the world out there, of the world that is not-I and not-eye.”

(From the essay by Benjamin Betka)

“Fiction” and “therapy” and relation between the two may provoke var-

ious interpretations and approaches. The present volume comprises ar-

ticles based on the papers delivered at The Self Industry: Therapy and

Fiction symposium held in Ustroń, Poland, 21–24 September 2011, one

of the annual conferences organized by the Institute of English Cultures

and Literatures of the University of Silesia, Katowice. It is a unique com-

bination of essays written by scholars from Poland, Germany, Sweden,

Swaziland, and Australia and a comprehensive collection of insights

into texts of culture and their therapeutic functions.

Contents

Introduction

Part One

Narcissists and Neurotics. Writing of Dissent

Niclas Johansson

Narcissus and Narcissism in Early Psychoanalysis: The Intertextual Dialogue

between Theme and Concept

Maria Korusiewicz

The Ajase Complex and Freudian Psychoanalysis: Some Notes on the Cultural

Consequences of “Foundational Myths”

Tadeusz Lewandowski

A Critique of the Discourse of the Self in Michael Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits

of Justice

Stephen Dewsbury

The Self in Temporary Autonomous Zones

Benjamin Betka

De ‑Pressed Masses: Affective Dissonance in Melancholia, Disease, and the Screened

(American?) World

Tomasz Gnat

Narcissus’s Narcosis: Formation of Self, Disintegration of Self: A Question of

Interactive Entertainment and Player ‑Character Identity Correlation

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Contents

Part Two

Herstories: The Self and Women’s Literature

Karen Ferreira ‑Meyers

Doubling or Dividing the Self: Examples from Autofictional Writing as Influenced

by Psychoanalysis

Anna Bugajska

Descent into Hell. Pauline Anstruther’s Long Way To Her Self

Grażyna Zygadło

“I change myself, I change the world.” Storytelling in Women’s Art

Sławomir Kuźnicki

Writing to Preserve the Self: A Woman’s Resistant Position in the Patriarchal Dys‑

topia of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Karolina Błeszyńska

In the Search of Self: Female Identity and Subjectivity in Doris Lessing’s “To Room

Nineteen”

Part Three

Therapy through Writing?

Łukasz Giezek

A Therapeutic Journal: Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde

Tomasz Markiewka

T(h)au for Torture? Writing on Trial in Teodor Parnicki’s Novel The Finger of Threat

Eliene Mąka ‑Poulain

“In Violence and Epiphany”: Seamus Heaney’s North

Wojciech Drąg

Writing Cure? Narrating Loss in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World

and The Remains of the Day

Anna Cholewa ‑Purgał

Neo ‑Nihilism and the Self Industry of Logotherapy

Małgorzata Nitka

“So many pages a day.” Writing, Compulsion, and Modernity

Agata Wilczek

Unnameable Loss: Melancholy and Postmodern Writing

102

111

123

137

151

161

178

190

205

240

228

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Contents

Part Four

Searching the Self

Aleksandra Lubczyńska

Illness – Therapy – Catharsis. Gender Roles, Camp, and Postmodern Identities in

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Maria Perzyńska

Therapy or Obsession? Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Problems with His Self

Jarosław Giza

Trapped in a Vicious Circle of the Tragic Triad… Miltonian Satan and Conradian

Kurtz’s Process of Unearthing Authentic Identity

Stephen Harris

Questioning the Cultural Industry of the Self: Fiction, Selfhood and Individualism

in Patrick White’s The Vivisector

Sławomir Konkol

I Am Not Me. The (Re)construction of the Self in Graham Swift’s Ever After

Alicja Bemben, Ewa Mazur ‑Wyganowska

Romantic Legacy in Non ‑Romantic Times. Two Different ‑Similar Approaches to

Searching for Self ‑Identity

Monika Gorzelak

Frame of Mind. Self Industry in Performance

Wojciech Szymański

Venice–Iceland: A Journey to Utopia

276

285

296

319

334

344

353

265

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Introduction

The present book comprises articles based on the papers delivered at The Self

Industry. Therapy and Fiction symposium held in Ustroń, Poland, 21–24 Sep-

tember 2011, one of the annual conferences organized by the Institute of English

Cultures and Literatures of the University of Silesia, Katowice. In the conference

call for papers we argued that:

“The last 200 years have produced a staggering wealth of writing on the Self,

at first mainly belles ‑lettres, later also non ‑fiction. Whether we take into con‑

sideration the High Romantics, such as Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffman, and

Percy Bysshe Shelley, pursuing the Self through archetypes of the Self, or George

Eliot’s fiction of apparently social concern (The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch),

or D. H. Lawrence’s and William Faulkner’s narratives, we are confronted with

dramas of consciousness. The advent of analytical psychology afforded not only

insights into the workings of the literary text, but also pointed to its frequent

therapeutic meaning for the author, individual reader, and community. The work

of Carl Gustav Jung and Stan Gooch, exploring the duality of man and stressing

the need to foster a new consciousness by integrating the feminine and the mas‑

culine, Viktor Frankl’s doctrine of overcoming the ‘tragic triad’ (suffering, guilt,

and transitoriness) and inner void by affirming Urvertrauen zum Dasein (‘the

basic trust in Being’) in existential acts of the ‘will to meaning’, provided two

frameworks for therapy. Sigmund Freud’s system provided another framework,

but what is perhaps as significant, it was admired for two different reasons. Her‑

mann Hesse admired the clarity of Freud’s thinking combined with the beauty of

language, while Thomas Mann – his literary characteristics: structure and form.

This interface of writing and therapy, much as in such famous accounts as Augus‑

tine’s or Rousseau’s Confessions, constitutes an intellectual challenge in that its

paradigms of exposure and suppression follow both tangled personal and rhe‑

torical agendas.”

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Introduction

The conference contributions provided an array of insights into the field sug‑

gested above that seemed to us to merit publication. For the purposes of clarity

we have decided to divide the texts submitted into four parts.

The first one, headed “Narcissists and Neurotics. Writing of Dissent,” begins

with Niclas Johansson’s article studying the relation between narcissism as a lit‑

erary concept and its use in early psychoanalysis. Likewise, drawing on Freud’s

theory, Maria Korusiewicz analyses the Ajase complex formulated by Kosawa

Heisaku, a myth of opposite psychic forces leading to positive resolution based

on three interconnected ideas: mutual love, forgiveness, and “great compassion.”

Tadeusz Lewandowski’s contribution discusses the communitarian philosophy of

Michael Sandel as a response to John Rawls’s liberal project in A Theory of Jus‑

tice. Invoking Protestant radicalism and what he terms “the buccaneer tradition,”

Stephen Dewsbury in his article on Hakim Bey’s anarchist thought “The Self in

Temporary Autonomous Zones” argues that self ‑creativity flourishes in places of

non ‑permanence, historical, discursive, and psychological lacunae emerging at

the interstices of established structures. Benjamin Betka’s “De ‑Pressed Masses:

Affective Dissonance in Melancholy, Disease, and the Screened (American?)

World” focuses on the “selving” processes in American culture which emerged

in response to Freud’s theory. The article posits the self as text while realigning

the neuroscientific concepts of “patient,” “health,” and “therapy.” The last article

in this section is Tomasz Gnat’s “Narcissus’s Narcosis: Formation of Self, Disin‑

tegration of Self: A Question of Interactive Entertainment and Player ‑Character

Identity Correlation” which discusses the questions of self formation and disinte‑

gration in interactive entertainment.

The second part headed “Herstories. The Self and Women’s Literature” com‑

prises five articles. Karen Ferreira -Meyers in “Doubling or Dividing the Self:

Examples from Autofictional Writing as Influenced by Psychoanalysis” investi‑

gates the inevitable link between psychoanalysis and autofiction in the work of

Nina Bouraoui and Amélie Nothomb, studying the techniques whereby the two

authors bring about a doubling or dividing of the Self into numerous conscious

and unconscious sub ‑selves. Similarly, Anna Bugajska’s article “Descent Into Hell.

Pauline Anstruther’s Long Way to Her Self” focuses on the idea of doppelgaenger

in Charles Williams’s novel Descent Into Hell understood as the essential aspect

of consciousness we learn to give up as part of our socialization, our terror and

error, a terrible good, not a menacing shadow but something we sacrifice for

the sake of others. Grażyna Zygadło’s contribution “ ‘I change myself, I change

the world’…” analyses the functions of storytelling in ethnic literature, while

Sławomir Kuźnicki’s reading of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale stresses

the self ‑therapeutic context of writing in an oppressive society. The last article

in the section, “In the Search for Self: Female Identity and Subjectivity in Doris

Lessing’s ‘To Room Nineteen’ ” inquires into the “othering” processes involved in

true self -expression, a discussion relying on Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection.

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Introduction

In “Therapy through Writing?,” part three of the volume, Łukasz Giezek dis‑

cusses Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, a metafictional novel

in which the creation of the past and the self becomes both personal healing and

a larger project of conferring meaning on the randomness of existence. Invok‑

ing Barthes, Bakhtin, and Jung, Tomasz Markiewka discusses the questions of

authorship and self ‑identity in “T(h)au for Torture? Writing on Trial in Teodor

Parnicki’s Novel The Finger of Threat.” Eliene Mąka ‑Poulain offers a reading of

one of Heaney’s most important collections of poetry in the article entitled “ ‘In

Violence and Epiphany’: Seamus Heaney’s North.” Wojciech Drąg’s contribution

focuses on the therapeutic function of literature in “Writing Cure? Narrating

the Loss in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of

the Day.” The article written by Anna Cholewa‑Purgał focusses on logotherapy,

a school of contemporary philosophy and a therapy based on finding meaning

in one’s life, and sets it against contemporary culture of neo-nihilism. Małgorzata

Nitka’s “ ‘So many pages a day’. Writing, Compulsion, and Modernity” discusses

George Gissing’s “conscious insincerity of workmanship” against the background

of George M. Beard’s Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences, a study of neu‑

rasthenia. In her contribution, “Unnameable Loss: Melancholy and Postmodern

Writing,” Agata Wilczek follows Paul de Man, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and

Walter Benjamin in pondering the consciousness of loss as one of the primary

areas of linguistic expression.

The fourth part is entitled “Searching the Self.” In the first article, invoking

Judith Butler’s category of gender performativity and Michel Foucault’s idea of

aesthetization of life, Aleksandra Lubczyńska analyses The Rocky Horror Picture

Show in terms of illness and therapy vis ‑à ‑vis gender roles in camp aesthetic.

What follows is the article entitled “Therapy or Obsession? Dante Gabriel Ros‑

setti’s Problems with His Self” where Maria Perzyńska analyses the autobio‑

graphical aspect of Rossetti’s poetry and painting, especially the influence of

his relationships with Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris on his work. “Trapped in

a Vicious Circle of the Tragic Triad… Miltonian Satan and Conradian Kurtz’s

Process of Unearthing Authentic Identity” by Jarosław Giza addresses the prob‑

lem of ensnarement of Milton’s and Conrad’s protagonists in Frankl’s tragic triad

perceived paradoxically as a constituent of the process of recovering genuine

self. Stephen Harris’s article “Questioning the Cultural Industry of the Self: Fic‑

tion, Selfhood and Individualism in Patrick White’s The Vivisector,” shows how

the author in question explores, in his idiosyncratic way, the possibilities and

limits of individual selfhood as imagined against the constraints of Australian

society and attitudes. Sławomir Konkol, in turn, conducts a Lacanian analysis in

“I Am Not Me. The (Re)construction of the Self in Graham Swift’s Ever After.”

The focus of the next contribution, “Romantic Legacy in Non ‑Romantic Times.

Two Different ‑Similar Approaches to Searching for Self ‑Identity” by Alicja

Bemben and Ewa Mazur -Wyganowska, is how Patrick Kavanagh and Robert

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Introduction

Graves exploit spirituality and mysticism in the process of poetic self ‑definition.

In “Frame of Mind. Self Industry in Performance,” Monika Gorzelak uses the

Derridean category of supplement to offer her interpretation of Sketches about

Ophelia, a dramatic performance by Teatr A Part. Last but not least, Wojciech

Szymański’s contribution “Venice–Iceland: A Journey to Utopia,” is a study of

non ‑normative sexual identity focused on W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood,

and Stephen Spender.

We wish to thank all the contributors who made the publication of this vol‑

ume possible and we hope that the reading of the essays included in this collec‑

tion will offer new “therapeutic” insights into cultural and literary texts.

The Editors

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Copy editor

Krystian Wojcieszuk

Cover designer

Kamil Gorlicki

Technical editor

Małgorzata Pleśniar

Proofreader

Gabriela Marszołek

Typesetting and text make up

Marek Zagniński

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego

ISSN 0208 ‑6336

ISBN 978 ‑83 ‑8012 ‑424 ‑0

(print edition)

ISBN 978 ‑83 ‑8012 ‑425 ‑7

(digital edition)

Published by

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego

ul. Bankowa 12B, 40‑007 Katowice

www.wydawnictwo.us.edu.pl

e‑mail: wydawus@us.edu.pl

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